HOW TO CIVILIZE CORPORATE BEHAVIOR

Above all else, corporate executives want us to believe they are
civilized people who mean well. Perhaps they are, but it doesn't
seem to matter. Take the case of DuPont.

DuPont is one of world's leading firms with 1989 sales of $35.2
billion. Founded in 1802, DuPont operates 85 chemical plants in
the U.S. and many others overseas. They have 143,000 employees
worldwide. Their slogan says they produce "better things for
better living" and during the past year or so they've been
running an award-winning TV ad with penguins and seals clapping,
and whales and dolphins dancing, all celebrating DuPont's
environmental record. But there's a deep and abiding dark side to
this leading corporate citizen.[1]

It was 1974 when two chemists in California published a technical
paper predicting that certain chemicals invented by DuPont
(chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs) would float upward in the
atmosphere and begin to destroy the Earth's ozone shield, 10 to
15 miles up in the sky. The Earth's ozone shield is a thin layer
of peculiar oxygen molecules (O3 instead of normal O2) which
filter out deadly ultraviolet rays streaming in from the Sun.
People have known for a long time that ultraviolet light is a
powerful germ-killing disinfectant. Scientists now understand
that life on land was impossible until the Earth's ozone shield
developed 450 million years ago. Until the ozone shield
developed, life had to stay in the sea because ultraviolet
radiation killed anything that ventured up onto the beach.

For these reasons, scientists in 1974 knew that loss of Earth's
ozone shield would be a real catastrophe threatening to make
Earth uninhabitable for humans. The nation's scientific
establishment soon began studying the situation. By 1976 the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--the most prestigious body of
scientists in America--announced their conclusion that CFC use
was most likely going to lead to a 7% loss of the earth's ozone
shield--a chillingly large change in a fundamentally important
ecosystem.[2] DuPont said, "Prove it" and continued CFC
production, full steam ahead. In 1979 NAS revised its estimate to
a 16.5% ozone loss. That year DuPont produced another 450
million pounds of CFCs and distributed them into the environment.
From 1974 through 1985 DuPont's CFC production held steady at 450
million gallons per year and its corporate position on ozone loss
remained unchanged: nothing has been proven, full steam ahead.

Meanwhile NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space
Administration) scientists were looking for measurable loss of
Earth's ozone shield. Since 1970, NASA had had satellites (Nimbus
4 and later Nimbus 7) 600 miles above the earth peering down
making ozone measurements. But the satellites reported no ozone
loss.

Then in 1985 a British scientist named Joe Farman announced he'd
recorded a 40% loss of ozone over the south pole and he revealed
that his data had begun showing ozone depletion as early as 1977.
Farnam had a tiny research program (funded by the British
government at $18,000 per year--yes, 18 thousand, not 18 million)
that had operated an instrument at the South pole for 25 years
measuring ultraviolet radiation striking the ground.

The news stunned NASA scientists whose multi-million-dollar
satellites had still found nothing. It turned out NASA's
satellites had been collecting data every year showing an ozone
hole growing ominously, but NASA scientists had programmed their
computers to ignore low readings because they "knew" such
readings resulted from faulty instruments, not from a real ozone
hole. They had the data but they had programmed their computers
to ignore it. After Farnam published his findings, our rocket
scientists reviewed many years of Nimbus data and found that,
yes, the ozone hole had been visible for years, but they had
simply missed it. By the time NASA finally found it, the ozone
hole was much larger than the area of the United States and
taller than Mount Everest. It was such a huge hole that it would
have been visible from as far away as planet Mars if anyone had
been there to look.

Each year since 1985, the ozone depletion problem has gotten
worse. Many scientists have created mathematical models to
predict the rate at which ozone loss will occur. All such models
have been wrong. Each year the measured losses have been greater
than mathematical models predicted.

Just last month the world received three new items of bad news
about loss of the ozone shield. A panel of 80 scientists,
gathered under the auspices of the United Nations, announced that
ozone destruction is proceeding three times as fast as it did
during the 1970s, and they said they expect the accelerated rate
to hold throughout the 1990s.[3] No one had predicted this
destructive acceleration. The same group also announced ozone
loss can now be measured not only over the south pole but also,
much more ominously, over the mid-latitudes where the U.S.
mainland sits. And, finally, they said ozone loss can now, for
the first time, be measured during spring and summer, when the
Sun's rays are strongest, when most people are outdoors and when
many people are intentionally basking in the Sun.

In April, 1991, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tripled its
earlier estimate of the number of skin cancers that ozone loss
will cause in U.S. citizens. During the next 50 years, EPA said
in April, ozone loss will cause 12 million skin cancers, causing
200,000 deaths. Worldwide, a billion (a thousand million) skin
cancers are expected to result from ozone depletion, including 17
million deaths over the next 50 years. And these figures will
need to be revised upward in light of the U.N. scientists'
October revelations. It is now clear that DuPont scientists have
unleashed a human catastrophe that dwarfs all previous chemical
disasters. And it is also clear that DuPont's corporate policy is
to continue to produce killer chemicals as long as possible,
resisting all efforts to bring the earliest achievable end to
this nightmare.

This year DuPont is still pumping 450 million pounds of CFCs into
the atmosphere, full steam ahead. In 1989, DuPont conducted a
campaign opposing CFC phase-out legislation in the U.S. Senate.
In 1990 DuPont Chief Executive Officer Ed Woolard said, "In my
opinion it has not been proven that CFCs are harmful to
ozone...." In 1991 DuPont executives took pains to block a
shareholder resolution that called for a phaseout of CFC
manufacture by 1995.

Because of rising social pressure, DuPont has said it intends to
phase out CFCs but the timetable remains in doubt. Meanwhile
DuPont has already built factories to produce CFC substitutes
called HCFCs. Unfortunately, HCFCs also deplete the ozone shield,
though more slowly than CFCs.

In addition, one of the new CFC substitutes, HCFC-123, has now
been found to cause tumors on the pancreas and testicles of rats.
DuPont's position is that the tumors on rats' testicles didn't
actually KILL any of the rats, and besides humans wouldn't
ordinarily be exposed to the chemical in concentrations as high
as the rats encountered. DuPont is now aggressively marketing
HCFC-123. Full steam ahead....

What must be clear from all this is that corporations like DuPont
cannot act responsibly because they have no real incentive to do
so. Furthermore, government, even if staffed by intelligent,
well-meaning people including large numbers of rocket scientists,
cannot curtail the blindness and hubris of a multinational
juggernaut like DuPont whose only legally-defined mission is to
return a profit to shareholders.